Parks & Beaches

On the campaign trail, Zohran Mamdani vowed to roughly double the funding for the parks department. His first budget proposal as mayor would cut its funding.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made moves to expedite the installation of new bike lanes across the city, many of which were sidelined under his predecessor Eric Adams.

On any given day, dozens of young people scour the downtown park with smartphones and microphones, looking for people to interview. Buskers and dog walkers increasingly compete for space with tripods, even in corners of the park with well-earned reputations for grittiness.

The quiet corner of the park is well known to birdwatchers, but fell into disrepair after years of neglect.

A deal announced by Mayor Eric Adams' office Friday would bring a new apartment building that houses a public pool and fitness center to the West Village. The new building would house 280 apartments, and would be built on a vacant city-owned lot.

West Village residents won't get their public swimming pool back anytime soon. The latest twist in a fight over a downtown public indoor basketball court, pool and exercise center came when mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani publicly supported a pitch by neighborhood groups to restore the space, which has been closed to the public since 2019.

A mile-long bulkhead in the Rockaways has been eaten away by the churning waters of Jamaica Bay and requires "aggressive" repairs that could take five years. The repair job, posted on a federal contracting website, was estimated to cost up to $100 million.

New York City's public pools turned into toilets at a surprisingly high rate last summer, as the parks department was forced to close its swimming holes 203 times to clean up a visitor's poop. Data obtained by Gothamist through a freedom of information request reveals the sheer scale of the defecation in the city's cherished bathing areas.

A stretch of Jacob Riis Park in the Rockaways remains too dangerous to use just ahead of beach season, and officials have no immediate plans to fix the area. Erosion continues to eat away at the section of shoreline where two teens died last year, and a surfer died at the same spot last month.

The National Park Service announced a $2.7 million refurbishment of the boardwalk at Jacob Riis Beach just east of the beach's 92-year-old bathhouse. Crews will resurface the boardwalk, build a new wheelchair-accessible ramp and replace 20 benches, with work slated for completion by December.

A Gothamist analysis of city data found that six of the seven drowning victims this summer lived in districts where fewer than half of residents have access to swimming facilities within 15 minutes by public transit.

Six people drowned at city beaches that summer — the highest number since 2019. 'We are in a state of emergency,' said Queens Borough President Donovan Richards. 'The administration needs to come to the table with sound solutions that will ensure that we don't lose more lives.'

Erosion is rapidly washing away the shoreline of Jacob Riis Park in Rockaway — and the National Park Service says the ongoing problem has created 'extremely hazardous' swimming conditions in an area of the beach where two teenage boys were swept out to sea last week.

Mayor Eric Adams hailed the reopening of the grand Astoria Pool on Thursday morning — but hours later, hundreds of New Yorkers were stuck waiting in line outside due to an ongoing shortage of lifeguards.

New York City is facing another dire lifeguard shortage this summer, raising the likelihood that swimmers' access to pools and beaches across the five boroughs will once again be limited. Data from the parks department shows there were 310 lifeguards at the city's beaches as of Tuesday, but city officials said 600 are needed to keep them all open for safe swimming.